The 9 best tools to use when hiring a Virtual Assistant — And Why It’s important

Hiring a virtual assistant has amazing benefits and is reshaping how high-performing professionals are working. Remote work requires collaboration more than ever. The good thing is, with great tools it’s easier than ever to be on top of your game with virtual assistants and make the most of your relationship. These are the top tools I recommend using while working virtually with an assistant.

Onlinejobs.ph

Onlinejobs.pH is a great place to find virtual assistants. It's a free platform that allows you to find inexpensive overseas talent.

Hubstaff

I use Hubstaff to track the time that my virtual assistants work for me. Some people will just trust their virtual assistants. I’m maybe a little bit more cynical and this tool’s really nice because as soon as one of the assistants starts work, they’ll hit the start button. And when they’re done or taking a break, they’ll hit stop. This tool will take random screenshots of your virtual assistant’s screen. So you can make sure that they’re actually doing what they were supposed to do.

Last Pass.

This is crucial. When working with virtual assistants, it allows you to share passwords with your assistant, but the passwords are encrypted. So they’re not able to steal your password. And if you ever need to fire your virtual assistant, all you have to do is remove them from the last pass and they lose access to everything. The reason this is so amazing is that you can give them passwords to things that are very sensitive. And as soon as you know, if you, for some reason, stop trusting them within one click, you can get rid of them from access to everything. Now in the past, if you wanted to give them access to 10 different things, you’d have to go in and change all 10 of those passwords. And that could be very time-consuming and annoying for you. So Last Pass is a great way to give access to all your different passwords to your virtual assistant without having to worry whether or not you can trust them.

Zelle and Venmo

There are other tools I use to pay all my virtual assistants. It makes it very easy and I personally just pay for any fees. Paypal is another great option. They take a $5 fee so, if I owe my virtual assistant $300, it’s going to end up costing me $305. Overall PayPal is, a great tool.

Dropbox

This is another tool. And I use Dropbox when trying to share large files. I also use Dropbox to give new tasks to my virtual assistants. Basically, I have a screen recorder set up. So if I’m gonna give a new task to my assistant, I’ll screen work myself doing it first, showing them how to do it. And then when I stop the screen recording, it goes into Dropbox and then it syncs into my VA’s Dropbox folder. They can watch it and then they can go do the task.

Google Drive

Google docs and Google sheets are the best tools when sharing documents like word documents or Excel documents. And it’s free.

Slack

Slack is one of those things. If you’ve never used it before at first, it doesn’t seem like it would be that helpful. I highly recommend checking it out and trying it out. Even if you don’t think at first glance that it sounds like it’s something that would be helpful. So the way slack works is it’s almost like a giant chat room that you and your virtual assistant or your virtual assistant team can use. And, that basically allows them to know how long they have to get it done.

Asana.

Asana is project management for tasks taking more than 24 hours to get the task done

Trello

Similar to Asana it allows you to track like, what is the status of this task? And that way there’s a centralized location where every time you give your assistant a task, they can, you can go check and say, Hey, what’s the status on this? And this is so important. I constantly have ideas for new tasks for my virtual assistants. And if I, if we didn’t have some way to track it, I’d forget what task I give to them. And so this is a way for me to track it and make sure that they’re accountable. So this brings me to the rules for working with virtual assistants.

These are nine tools entrepreneurs need to manage their virtual assistants!